


Purple Blooms

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Gore, Massage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5134961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In some lightly shimmering timeline, you've found yourself undoing the clown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purple Blooms

His hands are skinny-palmed, long fingered and with angled bone in the knuckles. He has ragged claws, too - magnified into the uncanny just because he is a troll. Kanaya’s fingers are, at least, neat, but just as noticeably long. She's something classic stretched upwards and given horns and fangs.

In his fangs and horns and hair and facepaint, Gamzee is much more of a creature than that. Too incongruous to really exist, yet he still seems to and idly, too, with his fingers stretched out in front of his face. But you see a lot of things that shouldn't be, but are. In that, though, they just shrug at you - don't you know how things are?

Most of those things are made up of data, you reason, and Gamzee is organic. Of bone and marrow, blood and muscle, but also quirks and reactions and other things he is in posession of because he is real.

Your personal sphere can intersect his as if you're throwing a spotlight on him when he's in a middling state and sitting in a dark room. He flexes his fingers and holds his wrist with his other hand. It's a small wrist; he doesn't seem to yet have the mass to support much broadness.

On the back of his hand, a vivid line blooms purple. When he moves his fingers, it changes shape, and when he pulls at his skin, it warps. He watches, observes a hole in him open and shut on command.

"Don't you feel weird to be alive and bloodfilled?" says Gamzee. "The bits of you what get to fit together, then get to disrupt. Then getting together motherfucking different."

Experimentally, he balls up his fist, and the cut swells. You can see the inner edges of the skin rise up, fresh, pale grey that wants to knit together. You let the origins of the cut stay in the dark, for now. Gamzee will tell you when he wants to, and it's nothing on its own. So many things have been mended despite him.

In a back room, off the main living area, you're both sitting on the floor. You have your backs against the wall and your lazy knees close to the chest. You used to think about trying to slip into some dark social corner when you were younger, but you never had the interpersonal acumen. You guess you wanted to see if you could, but it doesn't matter, now.

"I died in the sun," you say. "My flesh bubbling, my eyes bursting. It's just what happens, how it works. I got to see myself stripped to my bone in just a second. If we heal and then heal better, we're given better insight, I suppose. How much, though, I don't know."

That's the kind of information that you think you might be able to draw on, perhaps against your better nature. Gamzee just turns his eyes up to the ceiling, bigger than human eyes, eggyolk yellow. He smiles with all of his teeth, and then he laughs, bouncing and high-pitched. Gamzee, perhaps, does not really need his facepaint.

"Your body doesn't really think on not fixing itself, if it actually can be getting to," he says. "It don't think on any motherfucking reasons not to exist."

Ever since boarding the meteor, you've been only on the edge of trolldom and you haven't stuck your hand out too far, yet. You're on the edge, plucking at the fruit that grows roots in mysterious soil. Dave comes around for your countering, and you enjoy a nice game with Kanaya, but you think Gamzee must just grow further in. Harder inroads to make.

"Your body has no idea of the kind of mind it's carrying," you say. "It just wants to mend. Things just tick away."

Gamzee looks back to his hand. "This don't hurt so much," he says. "And, yeah, I guess no flesh actually motherfucking knows on miracles or blasphemy or what. It just wants to fix."

"It's an innocent organism," you say. "Yours could be your last bastion of sanctity."

Gamzee smiles, odd and sloping, so you can only see the end points of his teeth. Sometimes, strange things make themselves comprehensible. Stems sprout from skullfaces under the earth, tentacles rise from sunless flesh in the depths of the sea. Maybe a man slipping through a crack in reality, almost human. Younger you might be impressed.

"There's nothing to be sacrosanct, here," says Gamzee, looking down at his torso and pressing his fingers against it, gently, like he might have once deigned to at least be careful with himself and just remembers the urge. "Down to the motherfucking cell, I'm moving to be a thing what's to willfully be when it shouldn't."

You could pull on one of his loose curls. Troll hair feels soft and feathery, and his is tendriled like an underwater plant. You choose a strand above his ear, and that twitches as you get close, its soft shell fanning out. You’ve stared at the elegant point of Kanaya’s ear and eyed the dip beneath the barb on her left horn, where your finger could just slip. She doesn’t like you touching her horns much. Strange interactive modes.

Gamzee’s horns are open, symmetrical twists and, sometimes, you think they would match better to a troll with a more arch form of villainy. But they actually do belong to him; goat horns for the tricksters, for the fauns, for the dark gods. They are cool to the touch, and his stretched out hand goes limp when you do. You press your finger pad to the tip of one. It would be lethal at ninety degrees.

A cold draught shiver runs through him and he closes his eyes. You run your fingers downwards and rest them on the inward slope. When you lightly pull your fingers away, he growls deep from a place where the rest of him wraps around. You should treat him like glass, or an uncaged snake, you don’t know which.

Reality seems to snap back. Or some rhythmic pulse is coming from his center, making all the sense it needs to when he's born to twist around minds. So maybe it just comes, something so low down that it can only use the darkness to navigate. You might be used to things being a little elastic.

"Do these ever break?" You rewrap your fingers around the horn and his eyes lower shut, again, like a resting doll. It's somewhere along the line from stroking a cat or a warm bed on a Saturday morning. The animal is too big, and the dawn won't rise until you've turned sixteen.

"Haven't been to," he says, with an empty weight. He tilts his head back and lets his horntips scrape against the wall, your hand still clasped around the middle. You move your thumb back and forth, and note that the pattern of the movement makes it soothing. Gamzee looks at you sidewards, his eyes heavy lidded. "Any part of you ever never got to breaking?"

The base of his horn blooms red, but it isn't blood flowing and making under the surface, though that's easy to forget. You move your thumb down to rub against it, and you find it softer - just made, and that makes Gamzee shrug into your hand. "I was scoured from the inside out by space octopodes and then burned alive in the heart of a star. I elected to do both, so I have nothing original left," you say. Your voice is going loose.

Gamzee is more fluid and less discordantly mechanical as he turns his body to face you. He's straight on, examining your face with his heavy eyes. He doesn't pull away from your hand. You try pulling your hand away, and back down into his seafeather hair. He stays constant.

"I couldn't motherfucking think at the ways what you're whole," he says, like he might say a prayer, and your fingers are still brushing through his hair. "There's being bits of you that don't break."

Something has wriggled between your ribs, and licked at the edges of your mind. Fire cleanses through corruption, but that would only leave an empty space, and nothing that has never been touched. Gamzee smiles with all of his teeth and raises a finger, and pokes you in the forehead with a quick sting.

"Like what?" you ask. In the darkness shines another facet. His finger rests against your brow, because the soft of your skin interests him, just lightly.

His eyes flicker to where your hand rests in a lazy fist, and you uncurl your fingers when he moves against them, until his shoulder is against your palm. And you do offer a grip. "It ain't motherfucking like that. There's a cloud that I can't get fucking around, because it's not broken. And it maybe glows."

"Glows?" you ask. You sink in your fingers and under the faded material of his shirt, his skin slips over muscle. There are knots in the mess like tangled, fraying wires.

"Not that exact thing." Gamzee tilts his head, horns, hair and all, and looks up, thoughtfully. "I don't know, 'cause I'm not the guy who does the souls, pulls them the motherfuck around with his pointstubs. Nothing gets against my clawmeat except blood. But some things don't like rage, and are being to stop it."

You haven't been surprised that he knows about his own aspect, and that it seems to pulse electric under his skin. The game has made itself some fantastic weapons.

"Wouldn't everyone have something like that?" There are some things that you held in the abstract. But sBurb has not so much made them real but has merely shed light on.

Gamzee screws up his face like it's painted over a black hole. After that, you break through a barrier and you feel something go in his shoulder. He makes a noise, some kind of natural thrum in his chest. Something ping in yours and maybe that's the function.

Gamzee doesn't respond for a moment, blinking slow and lazy, his irises metallic and rusting dark. He waits for himself to reach a point before he speaks, again. "I get motherfucking voodoo obstruction. Like running against glass that knows not to get shattering," he says. "But there's divine fucking doctrine that says about souls getting to be swallowed whole. Many of one, one of motherfucking many. And sometimes." His voice runs thin and smokey-cracked. 

Your hand is soft on his shoulder. But, as he pauses, you think you feel something around the corner. "That's a motherfucking different thing, though. And you? Are the fucking many being one. Maybe."

Doorways to other timelines rattle and bang in your head. Maybe he could hear them, echoing in the shells of his ears. "As a seer," you say, for your benefit and for his. "There's versions of me from dimmer timelines, there because I know them and what they went through."

"Seers." He stretches the word out low and long and you get a rattle underneath. Then he twitches his fingers and puts them carefully on the shoulder you haven't touched. He hooks them to give experimental stabs beneath his shoulderblade. "Yeah. Ain't anything purer than a seer. You gotta get the flesh from the bone."

It's like a fact often repeated, or a verse recited from memory, and it doesn't come with a broad, fangy grin. Gamzee pauses his crooked fingers where they press into his shoulder. Some knot must wait there, too, tight and expectant.

You grab him, his forearm a tight, narrow cord between your fingers, his body an easy twist when he comes towards you. His muscles move as one sinew until his back is adjacent to your torso. His core relaxes when your hands catch him around his middle, as if you've rubbed against some button. 

He slumps, his body too long and lean to fit properly between your knees. Where his horns poke towards either side of your neck, you see their aggressive points.

You stare at the back of his oily, tangled head and put your hands on both his shoulders. You dig your thumbs in as hard as you can where the muscle frustrates. Gamzee flexes his spine, and makes an alien-eldritch noise in the back of his throat. You do it, again.

"I suppose we don't come apart, easily," you muse. The blades of his bones dig into the backs of your thumbknuckles. You know there will be red marks, but you push further, anyway. "Do bards?"

When Kanaya told you that she planned to kill him, it was simple - his time to die, easy as a clock ticking on time. There's cold, tight-lipped anger when he's on the periphery, and you do know that she could tear him limb from spidery limb and carve him out of himself.

Gamzee shrugs, bones bracing, muscles rising and falling. You feel the breaks where he could fall apart. The far end of your left palm brushes against his spine, which protrudes in sections and dips like a seam running down him.

"I don't know on bards," he says. "Hard to, when I've never laid peepers on any other motherfucker who dons the bardly regalia." His voice turns thin and imitative at the end. "So, I don't properly know. But I think no, because there's no miraculous spread like there is with seers. It's just. Shit goes through you, you don't go through shit."

If you pull on his shoulders, he just makes a noise like a deep, throbbing purr. There's something inside him that makes him do that, some gristly little bubble or nub.

"That's the best I can get to explaining," he adds. A deep pulse runs through his voice, now, and you pick it apart a little, leisurely. It's monstrous, rolling, incongruously inhuman. It stands to reason that you like the noise.

"Oh," you say. "it doesn't really make sense, but the game is manipulative and brutal, so it stands to reason."

You see the dome of Gamzee's eye when he turns his head to the side, the painted lines of his bones and his flat, alien nose. You stop for a moment, mid-bonepop. Perhaps you feel an angle veering off into the void. Gamzee tilts his head in the opposite direction, his skull light on his neck. You feel him move and he's hollow-boned, insubstantial.

"Could be," he says, thoughtfully. "Could be that the game just gets to splinter everyone's bones."

He means flesh for the sake of flesh, again, like an understanding. And there are versions of you that have had no choice but to get torn apart in the darkness, anyway. Gamzee just curves back into your hands with a murmuring chirp, sonorous and echoing from somewhere deep. He's slotting in somewhere; there must be some jagged space made for him.

He's gone marionette-limber, now. Gangly, kitsch, grotesque. You pick up a signalbeam, and you think he stretches half into the darkness. And when he's rendered small and docile and watching the cut distort on his hand, it still goes somewhere, to something huge. You wonder how much he can see.


End file.
